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j1KJ<:<Cc:X'<SS<:<: 






THE EARLY AMERICAN SPIRIT, AND 
THE GENESIS OF IT. 



The Early American Spirit. 



THE GENESIS OF IT. 

^ AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 

AT THE CELEBRATION OF ITS 

SE VENTIE TH ANNIVERSAR V, 
APRIL 15TH, 1875. 

BV ^ 

RICHARD S. STORRS. 



o'60] 



NEW YORK: 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 

^■875. 



COPYRIGHT, 1875, BY 

Anson D. F. Randolph & Co. 



"^q^ 






NOTE. 

In consequence of the length of the following- Address, 
occasional sentences, with two or three entire para- 
graphs, were omitted at the time of its delivery, Thcv 
are, how'ever, retained in the printed pamphlet, as in 
some degree important to the exhibition of the subject. 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. President: Members of the Historical 

Society: Ladies, and Gentlemen: 

The anniversary by which we are assembled marks 
the completion of the seventieth year of the useful 
life of this Society. It is an occasion of interest to all 
of us, if regarded only in this relation. There are 
some present who remember still the founders of the 
Society: Egbert Benson, its first President, John 
Pintard, Brockholst Livingston, Dr. John M. Mason, 
Drs. Samuel L. Mitchill and David Hosack, Rufus 
King, Samuel Bayard, Daniel D. Tompkins, DeWitt 
CHnton, and others whose names are less familiar. 
There are many present to whom are recalled memor- 
able foces, by the names of those who in subsequent 
years received its honors, or shared its labors, who are 
not now among the living: John Jay, Albert Gallatin, 
John Duer, Dr. McVickar, Gulian Verplanck, Charles 
King, Dr. John W. Francis, William L. Stone, 
Edward Robinson, Luther Bradish, Romeyn Brod- 
head. Dr. De Witt. 

All of us, who are of a studious habit, have enjoyed 
the labors and the influence of the Society, and have 



Address. 

been encouraged and quickened by it, as well as more 
directly aided, in the small excursions which we have 
made into the domain of historical knowledg^e. 

It is a source, therefore, I am sure, of unfeigned 
satisfaction to all of us to be able this evenins; to 
congratulate the honored President of the Society, 
its officers, and its members, on the success which it 
has accomplished, and on the promise of increasing 
prosperity with which its future here salutes us. In 
its incorporeal and continuing life, it has the dignity 
of age, without its decays. Its seventy years have 
brought larger fame, ampler resources, wider responsi- 
bilities ; but it has still the privilege of youth — the 
fair and far outlook of existence in its prime. It pro- 
jects our thoughts, from this eminent anniversary, 
over the periods which it anticipates, as well as over 
that which it reviews ; and we shall joyfully unite in 
the hope that its coming career may be only more full 
of gladness and growth than has been its past, and 
that its influence may constantly extend, as the years 
augment its possessions and its fame. 

Such institutions are beneficent powers in civiliza- 
tion. Whatever transports us from the present to the 
past, from the near to the remote, widens the mind as 
well as instructs it ; makes it capacious, and reflective ; 
sets it free, in a relative independence of local impulse 
and of transient agitation ; gives it, in a measure, a char- 
acter cosmopolitan, and a culture universal. Whatever 
recalls to us eminent persons — their brilliant and 



Usefulness of such Societies. 

engaging parts, above all, their fortitude, wisdom, self- 
sacrifice — re-enforces our manhood, encourages our vir- 
tue, and makes us ashamed of our indolent self- 
indulgence, of our impatient and fitful habit. 

A community like ours — restless, changeful, abound- 
ing in wealth, vehemently self-confident — especially 
needs such inspiring impressions from a more austere 
and temperate past. A Society which presents that, 
through libraries and lectures, is ethical, educational, 
and not merely ornamental. In larger proportions, 
with more copious ministry, it fulfils the office of the 
statue of Erasmus, standing always, with a book in 
its hand, in the market-place of Rotterdam, amid the 
intricate network of canals, and in the incessant roar 
of traffic. It materializes again the shadowy forms. 
It breathes upon communities, languid or luxurious, 
an ennobling force, from vanished actions and silent 
lips. Presenting, as to immediate vision, the patient 
and achieving years into whose conquests we have 
entered, it makes us aware of the duty which always 
matches our privilege, and of the judgment which 
coming time will strictly pronounce upon our era. It 
ministers to whatever most aspires in man, to what- 
ever is worthiest in civilization. And so it concerns 
the public welfare that this Society should long fulfill 
its important office, while the city expands to wider 
splendor, and the years fly on with accelerating haste ; 
that this anniversary should be one in a series, stretch- 
ing forward beyond our life, beyond the life of those 



Address. 

who succeed us, while the country continues the in- 
vitina: and affluent home of men. 

But this anniversary is not the only one to which 
our thoughts are to-night directed. By the irresistible 
progress of time, we are set face to face with others 
which are at once to occur, the succession of which, 
during several years, is to make large claim upon our 
attention ; and these are anniversaries, in comparison 
with whose significance, and whose secular importance, 
the one which assembles us would lose its dignity if 
it w^ere not itself associated with them. 

History can but picture events; setting forth, in a 
measure, their causes and consequences, and indicating 
the varieties of action and of character which were in- 
volved in them. It is, as has been said, " the biog- 
raphy, of communities." These Societies which pro- 
mote historical studies have it for their function to 
collect the materials, cultivate the tastes, assist the 
minute and complex investigations, out of which 
comes the ultimate enlightening historical narrative. 
Their office is therefore subordinate and auxiliary, 
though quickening and fine. The office of the his- 
torians whom they instruct, is commemorative only, 
not creative. They are the heralds who marshal the 
procession, not the princely figures who walk in it. 
They exhibit actions which they did not perform, and 
describe events in producing which they had no part. 

When, then, the events themselves are before us, 
the mere narrative of which the student writes and the 

6 



Another Aiuiiversary. 

library assists, our chief attention is challenged by 
them. Contemplating them, we lose sight, compara- 
tively, of the instruments which had made their out- 
line familiar, forgetting the processes before the 
vitality and the mass of the facts to which these 
had brouo-ht us. It is with us as with the traveler, 
who ceases to remember the ship which carried him 
across the seas, when he treads the streets of the dis- 
tant town, watches its unfamiliar manners, hears the 
dissonance of its strange speech, and looks with a sur- 
prised delight on its religious or civil architecture. 
So we, in front of the great events, the signal actions, 
the mean or the illustrious characters, to which the 
historical narrative has borne us, forget for the time the 
narrative itself, or only remember the intellectual grace 
which moulded its lines, the strength of proof which 
confirmed its conclusions, the buoyant movement with 
which it bore us across intervening floods of time. 

We stand, as a people, in the presence of a com- 
manding Past, and shall continue so to do in succeed- 
ing years of our national experience. One centennial 
anniversary, dear to the thoughts of every lover of 
English eloquence and American liberty, has passed 
already ; and you will pardon me, perhaps, if I pause 
upon that, because it has suggested the theme on 
which I would offer some remarks. 

It was just one hundred years ago, on the twenty- 
second of March last, that Edmund Burke delivered 
in the British Parliament that speech on " Concilia- 



Address. 

tion with the Colonies," which, of itself, would have 
assured the fame of any speaker. The profoundest 
political and legislative wisdom was presented in it 
with perspicuous clearness, and enforced with an elo- 
quence which Burke himself never surpassed. In 
eager and majestic utterance, he recited the circum- 
stances which had led him to seek, with impassioned 
ardor, to promote the reconciliation of the colonies 
to the Government of Great Britain ; and to do this 
by repealing the acts of Parliament against which re- 
sistance had here been aroused, and by adjusting 
future legislation on the plan of getting an American 
revenue, as England had got its American empire, by 
securinof to the colonies the ancient and inestimable 
English privileges. 

• The speech is, of course, familiar to you ; yet a rap- 
id indication of its compact and coercive argument 
may serve, perhaps, to revive it in your thoughts, as a 
couplet sometimes recalls a poem, as the touch of 
even an unskilful crayon may set before us the wide 
outreach of a landscape. 

The circumstance to which he first referred, was the 
rapid increase of the colonial population ; an increase 
so swift, and so continuing, that, in his own words, 
" state the numbers as high as we will, whilst the dis- 
pute continues, the exaggeration ends. . . . Your 
children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood, 
than they [of the colonies] spread from families to 
communities, and from villages to nations." 



The Oration of Burke. 

The second circumstance which impressed his mind, 
was the commerce of the colonies : " out of all pro- 
portion, beyond the numbers of the people ; " in re- 
spect to which " fiction lags after truth ; invention is 
unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren." Of their 
expanding agriculture, he said : " For some time past 
the Old World has been fed from the New. The 
scarcity w4iich you have felt would have been a deso- 
lating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true 
filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full 
breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its 
exhausted parent." Of the fisheries of the colonies, 
especially of the whale-fishery, he spoke in words 
whose fame is co-extensive with the English tongue, 
as carried to an extent beyond that reached by " the 
perseverance of Holland, the activity of France, or the 
dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ;" 
and this by a people " who are still, as it were, but in 
the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of 
manhood." 

Still more important, however, before his view than 
either the increasing population of the colonies, their 
agriculture, or their commerce, was the temper and 
character of the people who composed them ; in which 
a love of freedom appeared to him the predominating 
feature, distinguishing the whole. The people of the 
colonies were descendants of Englishmen. They 
were, therefore, " not only devoted to liberty, but to 
liberty according to English ideas ; " and so they were 



Address. 

fundamentally opposed, with all the force of immemo- 
rial tradition, to that taxation without representation, 
against which the English lovers of freedom had al- 
ways fought. Their popular form of government, 
through provincial assemblies, contributed to foster 
this attachment to liberty. Their religion gave to this 
civil influence complete effect. "The people," he 
said, " are Protestants ; and of that kind which is the 
most adverse to all implicit submission of m.ind and 
opinion. . . . Their religion is a refinement on the 
principle of resistance ; it is the dissidence of dissent, 
and the Protestantism of the Protestant reliafion." 

If this were not strictly true in the southern colo- 
nies, where the Church of England had wider estab- 
lishment, yet the spirit of liberty was there only higher 
and haughtier than in others, because they had a mul- 
titude of slaves; and "where this is the case," he 
affirmed, " in any part of the world, those who are 
free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their free- 
dom. . . . The haughtiness of domination com- 
bines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders 
it invincible." 

The education of the colonies, particularly the ex- 
tent to which the study of the law was cultivated among 
them, contributed to their untractable spirit. It led 
them, not, " like more simple people, to judge of an ill 
principle in government only by an actual grievance," 
but to " anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure 
of the grievance by the badness of the principle." 



Biirke's Conclitsion as to the Colonies, 

The last cause of the disobedient spirit in the colo- 
nies, to which he called the attention of Parliament, 
was " laid deep in the natural constitution of things " — ■ 
in the remoteness of their situation ; the three thou- 
sand miles of ocean forever intervening between Eng- 
land and them. 

From all these sources, the ever-widening spirit of 
liberty had grown up in the colonies, now unalter- 
able by any contrivance. " We cannot," he said, " we 
cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, 
and persuade them that they are not sprung from a 
nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. 
. . . I think it is nearly as little in our power to 
change their republican religion as their free descent ; 
. . . and the education of the Americans is also on 
the same unalterable bottom with their religion ; " 
while, if all these moral difficulties could be got 
over, " the ocean remains. You cannot pump this 
dry. And as long as it continues in its present bed, 
so long all the causes which weaken authority by dis- 
tance will continue." 

His inference from all was, that no way was open 
to the Government of Great Britain, but to " com- 
ply with the American spirit as necessary ; or, if you 
please, to submit to it, as a necessaiy evil." " My hold 
of the colonies,'' he said, " is in the close affection 
which grows from common names, from kindred 
blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. 
These are ties, which, though light as air, are strong as 



Address. 

links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the 
idea of their civil rights associated with your 
government ; — they will cling and grapple to you ; and 
no force under heaven will be of power to tear them 
from their allegiance. . . The more they multiply, 
the more friends you will have ; the more ardently 
they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obe- 
dience. . . It is the spirit of the English Constitu- 
tion, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, 
feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the em- 
pire, even down to the minutest member." 

If I were in the least ambitious, Ladies and Gentle- 
men, to attract your attention to any imagined skill 
of my own in presenting a subject, I should not have 
ventured thus to recall to you the magnificent scope, 
the pervading power, the instinctive and harmonious 
splendor, of that memorable oration with which, a 
hundred years ago last month, the oaken rafters of St. 
Stephen's rang. The perfect apprehension of remote 
facts, as when the distant seas or summits are seen 
by an eye which needs no glass, through a wholly 
transparent air; the vast comprehension, which took 
into immediate vision all facts and principles related 
to the subject, tracing at a glance their inter-relations, 
as one traces the lines of city streets from a ' coigne 
of vantage ' above the roofs, and sees the rivers on 
either hand which kiss the piers ; the opulence of 
knowledge ; the precision and force of argumentation ; 
the fervor of feeling, the energy of purpose, which 



The Early Spirit of the Colonies. 

modulated the rhetoric to its consenting grace and 
majesty ; the lucid and large philosophy of history ; 
the imperial imagination, vitalizing all, and touching 
it with ethereal lights : — we look at these, and almost 
feel that eloquence died when the lips of Burke were 
finally closed. One's impulse is to turn to silence ; 
and not even to offer his few small coins, more paltry 
than ever before the wealth of such regalia. 

But I have no desire at all, except to stand wn'th 
you a few moments at the point of view at which the 
oration of Burke has placed us, and to seek, with you, 
to revive in our thoughts, v/ith a little more of fulness 
in detail, the origin and the growth of that essential 
and prophesying spirit which he from afar discerned 
in these colonies. For in that lies the secret of our 
subsequent history. It is not certain that Burke 
himself, looking at the matter through the partial 
lights of English narrative, and treating the subject 
for immediate practical influence upon Parliament, 
has fully set forth either the sources or the strength 
of the temper which he sav/. But the complete 
understanding of these is most important to whom- 
soever would read our annals. 

The remark was long ago made by Macchiavelli,* 
that ' States are rarely formed or re-formed save by 

* " It must be laid down as a general rule, that it very seldom or 
never happens that any government is either well-founded at tirst, or 
thoroughly reformed afterwards, except the plan be laid and conducted 
by one man only, who has the sole power of giving all orders, and mak- 
ing all laws, that are necessaiy for its establishment." 

Political Discourses, upon Livy. Book L, chap. ix. 

13 



Address. 

one man,' Certainly, however, it was not so with 
ours. The spirit shaped the body, here, according 
to the Platonic plan. The people formed its own 
commonwealths, its ultimate Nation; and "the peo- 
ple," says Bancroft, looking back to the peace of 
1782, "the people was superior to its institutions, 
possessing the vital force which goes before organiza- 
tion, and gives to it strength and form."'^ This vital force, 
therefore, in the pre-Revolutionary American people, 
this inherent and energizing life, early developed, 
largely trained, acting at that time, and acting ever 
since, on our organized public development — this is 
the subject which I hope you w^ill accept, as deserving 
your attention, and not unsuited to this occasion. 

At the time when Burke saw the meaning, and 
interpreted the menace, of this distinctive American 
spirit, it had all the force which he ascribed to it ; 
and the effect of it was shown, only more speedily, in 
larger and more energetic discovery, than he expected. 
It can scarcely be doubted that if the counsels of his 
wise statesmanship had been listened to by the Parlia- 
ment on whose unheeding ears they fell, and by the 
Court which passionately repulsed them, the separa- 
tion which was inevitable, between England and the 
colonies, would for a time have been postponed ; and 
some of us might have been born, on American shores, 
the loyal subjects of King George. But those coun- 
sels were not heeded ; as those of Chatham, six 

* Kistory of the United States, Vol. X, p. 593. 



First Movements in the Colonies, 

weeks earlier, in the House of Lords, had not been ; 
and just four weeks after they were uttered, before 
report of them could probably have reached this 
country, on the 19th of April, at Lexington and at 
Concord, out of the threatening murk of discontent 
shot that fierce liash of armed collision between the 
colonists and the troops of Great Britain, beyond 
which reconciliation was impossible ,• of which the 
war, and the following Independence, were the pre- 
destined sequel. 

Not quite a month later, as you remember, on the 
loth of May, Ticonderoga, with Crown Point, was 
taken by the provincials ; and on the very day of the 
capture — as if to justify the name " Carillon," given 
by the French to Ticonderoga, and to make its seizure 
the striking of a chime of bells'"^ — the Continental Con- 
gress re-assembled at Philadelphia, with the proscribed 
John Hancock soon at its head, and entered on the 
exercise of its long authority ; an authority vague and 
undefined, as such an occasional authority must be, 
but made legitimate, and made comprehensive, by the 
voluntary submission of those whom the Congress 
represented. Washington was appointed Commander- 
in-Chief. As indicative of the tendencies of public 
opinion, before the end of May, the citizens of Meck- 
lenburg county, in North Carolina, by public action 

* " To Ticonderoga, the Indian ' Meeting of Waters,' they [the 
French] gave a name apparently singular, 'Carillon,' a Chime of Bells." 

Egbert Benson's Mem. ; Coll. of the N. Y, Hist. Soc, 2d Series : Vol. 2 : 
page 96. 

15 



Add}-'ess. 

disowned allegiance to the British Crown, and adopted 
their declaration of Independence; and on the 17th 
of June, at Breed's Hill, the ability of the provincials 
to throw up redoubts under the cannon-fire of a fleet, 
and to make grass fences, with men behind them, a 
' sufficient barrier to repeated charges of British veterans, 
was fully proved; and the great drama of our seven 
years' war was finally opened. 

During the years immediately before us, these 
events, with those which succeeded, will be fully re- 
cited ; and eloquence and poetry, the picture and the 
bronze, will again make familiar what the bulk and 
the prominence of intervening events had cartly 
hidden from our view. The evacuation of Boston by 
the British ; the bloody fight on the heights behind 
Brooklyn, so nearly fatal to the American cause ; the 
crossing of the Delaware ; the night attack on the 
Hessians at Trenton ; Princeton, and Germantown, 
with the frightful winter at Valley Forge ; the battles 
of Monmouth, Saratoga, Camden, King's Mountain, 
and Eutaw Springs; the final surrender of Cornwallis, 
at Yorktown : — all will in their turn be described, as 
their centennial anniversaries occur. The Past will 
come back to us. We shall hear again the pathetic 
and heroic story which touched the common-place 
life of our childhood with romance and with awe. 

And with this will be repeated the narrative — not 
less impressive — of the civil wonders which accom- 
panied the long military struggle; of the separate 
16 



M7'. Bancrofts History, 

Constitutions adopted by the colonies ; of the great 
Declaration, which raised those colonies into a 
Nation ; of the marvellous State-papers, which seemed 
to Europe prepared in the w^oods, yet on which the 
highest encomiums were pronounced, by eminent 
Englishmen, in Parliament itself; of the Articles of 
Confederation, which prepared the way for an organic 
Union ; of the French alliance, which brought sol- 
diers of a monarchy to fight for a republic, and sent 
back with them a republican spirit too strong for the 
monarchy ; of the money, so worthless that a bushel 
of it would hardly buy a pair of shoes ; of the military 
stores, so utterly inadequate that barrels of sand had 
to represent powder, to encourage the troops ; of the 
final adoption, after the war, of that now venerable 
Constitution of government, which recent changes 
have expanded and modified, but under which the 
nation has lived from that day to this. All these will 
hereafter be recited. 

It cannot but be regarded as a fortunate circum- 
stance — fortunate for himself, and for those to wdiose 
means of historical study he has made such large and 
brilliant contributions — that the concluding volume 
of his History has just been published by Mr. Bancroft, 
whose relations to this Society have been so intimate ; 
and that down to the peace of 1782 he has completed 
his elaborate and shining narrative. The enthusiasm 
of youth has survived in him, to animate and enhance 
the acquisitions of age ; and those who read, in their 



Address. 

own 7011th, his earlier volumes, and admired alike their 
strength and polish, will rejoice that his hand has placed 
the capital upon the tall and fluted shaft. " Worthy 
deeds," said Milton, "ai'e not often destitute of worthy 
relators ; as by a certain fate, great acts and great elo- 
quence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equal- 
ling and honoring each other in the same ages." ^ 

It is, of course, not my purpose to ask your attention 
to any of the particulars of that remarkable and fasci- 
nating history whose jutting outlines I have traced. 
Next week, at Lexington and at Concord, eloquent 
voices will open the story. Others will follow, in swift 
succession, till every field, and each principal fact, has 
found celebration. My office is merely preparatory to 
theirs. The subject before me is not picturesque. It 
hardly admits of any entertaining or graphic treatment. 
But it nevertheless is of primary importance ; and all 
who follow will have to assume what I would exhibit. 
There was a certain energizing spirit, an impersonal 
but inherent and ubiquitous temper, in the people of 
the colonies, which lay behind their wide and sudden 
Revolutionary movement ; which pushed that move- 
ment to unforeseen ends, and which built a Republic 
where the only result sought at the outset was relief 
from a tax. Burke discerned this, before it had been 
exhibited in the field, or had done more than give its 
own tone to debates and State-papers. From that 
time on, to the end of the war, it was con.stan.tly de- 

* Hist. Brit. Book IL 



The Spirit of the people important. 

clared — brooding and brightening in the obscurest 
air, giving Congress its authority, giving conflict its 
meaning, inspiring leaders, restoring always the shat- 
tered and the scanty ranks. It was this invulnerable, 
inexpugnable force, which no calamities could ever 
overwhelm, which was sure, from the start, of the 
ultimate victory. 

It is this, and this only, of which the world ever 
thinks in connection with the time, or of which the 
permanent history of the country will take much 
account. The incidents are trivial, except for their re- 
lation to this. It surprises us to remember how small 
were the forces, on either side, in that " valley of decis- 
ion " in which questions so vital to us, and to mankind, 
were submitted to the arbitrament of battle ; that Bur- 
goyne's army numbered at its surrender less than six 
thousand English and German troops, and had never 
contained more than eight thousand, with an uncertain 
contingent of Canadians and Indians ; that at Camden, 
Gates had but six thousand men, only one-fourth of 
them Continentals, and Cornwallis but two thousand ; 
that the force which capitulated at Yorktown was but 
seven thousand ; and that the whole number of troops 
sent from England to this countiy, during the en- 
tire continuance of the war, was less than a hundred 
and thirteen thousand. 

Compare these numbers with those of the large and 
disciplined armies which Frederick II., twenty years 
earlier, encountered at Rossbach and at Leuthen; 



Address. 

compare them with those which, thirty years after, 
swarmed forth from France, under Napoleon, — and 
they are the small dust of the balance. Compare them 
with those of -France, on the one hand, or of Germany 
on the other, in their tremendous unfinished duel, and 
the largest battles in which our fathers took part seem 
skirmishes of outposts. Nay, compare them with the 
forces, from the North and the South, which fought 
each other in our late civil war, and the Revolutionary 
musters become nearly imperceptible. 

It was the spirit behind the forces, which wielded the 
instruments, and compelled the events, which gave 
these any importance in history. Impalpable, indes- 
tructible, omnipresent in activity, self-perpetuating, 
there was this vital impersonal temper, common to 
many, superior to all, which wrought and fought, from 
first to last, in the Congress, on the field. In some 
respects it was a unique force, without precise parallel 
among peoples, breaking in unexpectedly on the 
courses of history. A more or less clear recognition 
of the fact has given to that time its relative promi- 
nence before mankind. A distinct apprehension of the 
nature of the force so victoriously revealed, is necessary 
to show how the Revolution became as complete and 
fruitful as it was, and how that small American strug- 
gle, going on in a country remote and recent, and 
succeeded by events incomparably more striking, has 
taken its place among the significant and memorable 
facts in the history of the world. 



TJie Colonists plain people. 

What was that force, then ? and whence did it 
come ? If I mistake not, it was ampler in its sources, 
more abundant, more secular, and more various in its 
energy, than we have often been wont to conceive. 

There was certainly nothing of the ideal-heroic 
among the ante-Revolutionary people of this country. 
They did not live for sentiment, or on it. They were 
not doctrinaires, though they are sometimes so repre- 
sented ; and nothing could have been further from their 
plans than to make themselves champions of what did 
not concern them, or to go crusading for fanciful theo- 
ries and imaginary prizes. They were, for the most 
part, intelligent, conscientious. God-fearing people — at 
least those were such who gave tone to their com- 
munities, and the others either accepted the impres- 
sion, or achieved the imitation, of their governing 
spirit. But they were plain, practical people, almost 
wholly of the middle-class, who lived, for the most 
part, by their own labor, who were intent on practical 
advantages, and who rejoiced in conquering the wil- 
derness, in making the marsh into a meadow, in suck- 
ing by their fisheries of the abundance of the seas, and 
in seeing the first houses of logs, with mud mortar, 
and oiled paper for glass in the windows, giving place 
to houses of finished timber, or imported brick, with 
sometimes even mahogany balustrades. 

When the descendants of the settlers at the mouth 
of the Piscataqua, replied to a reproof of one of their 
ministers, that the design of their fathers in coming 



Address. 

thither had not been simply to cultivate religion, but 
also largely to trade and catch fish, they undoubtedly 
represented a spirit which had been common along 
the then recent American coast.* The Plymouth 
Colony was exceptional in its character. To a large 
extent, the later and wealthier Massachusetts Colony 
was animated by sovereign religious considerations; 
and so were those of Rhode Island and Connecticut. 
But they are certainly right who affirm that even these 
men, or many of them, showed a tough and persistent 
secular enterprise combining with their religious zeal. 
It was indeed an indispensable element to the sound- 
ness of their character. It kept them from vv^ide fanat- 
ical excesses. It made them hardy, sagacious, inde- 
fatigable, inflexible in their hold on the fields and the 
freedoms which they had won. 

As compared with our more recent pioneers, who 
have peopled the territories, subdued the moun- 
tains, and opened toward Asia the Golden Gate, the 
religious element was certainly more prominent in 
those who earliest came to this country. But even 
they were far from being blind to material advantages, 
and far enough from being willing to live as idle en- 
thusiasts. " Give m.e neither poverty nor riches," was 
their constant prayer ; with an emphasis upon " poverty." 
They meant to worship God according to their con- 
sciences ; and woe be to him who should forbid ! But 
they meant, also, to get what of comfort and enjoyment 
* Adams' Annals of Portsmouth. Page 94. 



Misconceptio7i of the Colonists easy. 

they could, and of physical possession, from the world 
in which they worshipped ; and they felt themselves 
co-workers with God, when the orchard was planted, 
and the wild vine tamed ; when the English fruits had 
been domesticated, under the shadow of savage for- 
ests, and the maize lifted its shining ranks upon the 
fields that had been barren ; when the wheat and rye 
were rooted in the valleys, and the grass was made to 
grow upon the mountains. 

It is easy, of course, to heighten the common, to 
magnify the rare and superior virtues, of men to whom 
we owe so much. Time itself assists to this, as it 
makes the mosses and lichens grow on ancient walls, 
disguising with beauty the rent and ravage. It is 
easy to exaggerate their religious enthusiasm, till all 
the other traits of their character are dimmed by its 
excessive brightness. Our filial pride inclines us to 
this ; for, if we could, we should love to feel, all of us, 
that we are sprung from untitled nobles, from saints 
who needed no canonization, from men of such heroic 
mould, and women of such tender devoutness, that the 
world elsewhere was not worthy of them ; that they 
brought to these coasts a wholly unique celestial life, 
through the scanty cabins which were to it as a 
manger, and the quaint apparel which furnished its 
swaddling-clothes ; that airs Elysian played around 
them, while they took the wilderness, as was said of 
the Lady Arbella Johnson, "on their way to heaven." 

I cannot so read their history. Certainly, I should 

23 



Address, 

be the last in this assembly to say any word — in what- 
ever haste, in whatever inadvertenee — in disparage- 
ment of those who, with a struggle that we never 
have paralleled and can scarcely comprehend, planted 
firmly the European civilization upon these shores. 
I remember the hardness which they endured, and 
shame be to me, if, out of the careless luxury of our 
time, I say an unworthy word of those who faced for 
us the forest and the frost, the Indian and the wolf, 
the gaunt famine and the desolating plague. I re- 
member that half the Plymouth colonists died the 
first winter, and that in the spring, when the long- 
waiting Mayflower sailed again homeward, not one of 
the fainting survivors went with her, — and I glory in 
that unflinching fortitude which has given renown to 
the gandy shore ! Our vigor is flaccid, our grasp 
uncertain, our stitfest muscle is limp and loose, beside 
the unyielding grapple of their tough wills. 

But wiiat I do say is, that the figures of even the 
eminent among them were not so colossal as they 
sometimes appear, through the transfiguring mists of 
Time ; that of culture, as we know it, they for the 
most part had enjoyed very little ; that even in char- 
acter they were consciously far from being perfect. 
They w^ere plain people, hard-working, Bible-reading, 
much in earnest, with a deep sense of God in them, 
and a thorough detestation of the devil and his works; 
who had come hither to get a fresh and large oppor- 
tunity for work and life ; who were here set in cir- 
24 



The Colonists transferring great forces. 

cumstances which gave stimulus to their energy, and 
brought out their pecuhar and masterful forces. But 
they were not, for the most part, beyond their asso- 
ciates across the seas in force or foresight ; and they 
left behind them many their peers, and some their 
superiors, in the very qualities which most impress us, 
" Not many wise, not many noble, not many mighty," 
— then, as aforetime, that was true of those whom God 
called. The common people, with their pastors and 
guides, had come to the woods, to labor, and pros- 
per, and hear God's word. And upon them He put 
the immense honor of building here a temple and a 
citadel, whose walls we mark, whose towers we count, 
and to which the world has since resorted. 

But it is, also, always to be remembered that the 
early settlers of this country were not of one stock 
merely, but of several ; and that all of them came out 
of communities which had had to face portentous 
problems, and which were at the time profoundly 
stirred by vast moral and political forces. They were 
themselves impregnated with these forces. They 
bore them imbedded in their consciousness ; entering, 
whether articulately or not, with a dominant force 
into their thought, into their life. They transported 
to these coasts, by the simple act of transferring their 
life hither, a power and a promise from the greatest 
age of European advancement. They could not have 
helped it, if they would. They could more easily have 
left behind the speech which they had learned in child- 

25 



Address. 

hood, than they could have dropped, on their stormy 
way across the ocean, the self-reliance, the indomitable 
courage, the constructive energy, and the great aspira- 
tion, of which the lands they left were full. 

This, it seems to me, is hardly recognized as clearly 
and widely as it should be : that the public life of a 
magnificent age — a life afterward largely, for a time, 
displaced in Europe, by succeeding reactions — was 
brought to this continent, from different lands, under 
different languages, by those who settled it ; that it 
was the powerful and moulding initial force in our 
civilization ; and that here it survived, from that time 
forward, shaping affairs, erecting institutions, and mak- 
ing the Nation what it finally came to be. 

They may not themselves have been wholly aware 
of what they brought. There was nothing in the out- 
ward circumstance of their action to make it distin- 
guished. They had no golden or silver censers in 
which to transport the undecaying and costly flame. 
The^^ brought it as fire is sometimes carried, by rough 
hands, in hollow reeds. But they brought it, never- 
theless ; and here it dwelt, sheltered and fed, till a 
continent was illumined by it. Let us think of this a 
little. Let some rapid suggestions call up to us the 
:imes, the new and unmeasured energies of which 
swept out to this continent, when the colonists came ; 
all the forces of which — political, social, and not 
merely religious — found here their enlarging arena. 

At the time of the seizure of New Netherland by 
26 



Elements of the P opitlation. 

the English, in 1664, the main elements of the popu- 
lation, afterward composing the thirteen colonies, were 
already on these shores. Subsequent arrivals brought 
increase of numbers, except in New England, where 
the English immigration was then at its end. Impor- 
tant colonies, as Pennsylvania and Georgia, date their 
existence from a time more recent. But the principal 
nationalities of northern and north-western Europe, 
from v/hich our early population was derived, had 
already representatives here ; and what followed con- 
tributed rather to the increase than to the change of 
that population. It was said, you know, that eight- 
een languages were spoken before then in the thriv- 
ing village which Stuyvesant surrendered, and which 
is now this swarming metropolis;* and we certainly 
know that Englishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, 
French Huguenots, Scotch Presbyterians, Quakers, 
and CathoHcs, were at that time upon the American 
coast. 

From that point, then, it is well to look back, and 
see what was the governing spirit, the diffused and 
moulding moral life, which the steady immigration of 
sixty years, back to the date of the building of James- 
town, had been bringing hither. For these sixty years, in 

* This surprising statement appears to have been first made as early 
as 1643, by the Director-General Kieft, to Father Jogues, the Jesuit 
Priest, escaped from the Iroquois, who was then his guest. It was 
afterward repeated by Father Jogues, in his Description of New Nether- 
land. 

Coll. N. Y. Hist. Soc, 2d Series. Vol 3 : page 215. 



Address. 

comparison with the hundred and ten which followed, 
were like the first twenty-five years in one's personal life, 
compared with the fifty which succeed. They gave the 
direction, projected the impulse, prescribed the law, of 
the subsequent development ; and they, of course, sur- 
pass in importance any other equal period, in showing 
how the nation came at last to be what it was. But 
these sixty years, also, were vitally connected with the 
lorty or fifty which had gone before them ; since in 
those had been born, and morally trained, the men and 
women who subsequently came hither. Out of those 
had come the vivifying forces which the settlers at 
Jamestown, and they who came later, transferred to 
this continent. We shall not have reached the top- 
roots of our history, till we have gone back to their 
beginning. 

Look back, then, from the surrender of New Am- 
sterdam, to the date of the coronation of Queen Eliza- 
beth, in 1558 — less than fifty years before James- 
town began, little more than fifty years before Adrian 
Block built on this island its first small ship,^' and 
named it " The Restless," — and you have before you 

* This was in 1614 ; but another ship had been previously constructed 
on the coast. " Mr. Cooper, in his Naval History, speaks of Block's 
yacht as ' the first decked vessel built within the old United States.' But 
the honor of precedence in American naval architecture must fairly be 
yielded to Popham's unfortunate colony on the Kennebec. The ' Vir- 
ginia,' of Sagadahoc, was the first European-built vessel within the 
original thirteen States. The ' Restless,' of Manhattan, was \\\t pioneer 
craft of New York." 

Brodhead's Hist, of New York. Vol. I., page 55. (Note.) 

28 



A remarkable Century. 

the remarkable century, out of which had broken the 
settlements on these shores, at the end of which they 
all had passed under British supremacy. That was the 
birth-time of our public life. From its great spirit, 
from its energetic and vivid experience, fell a splendor 
and a power on the embryo people which finally be- 
came the American Nation. 

It was a munificent, a heroical century ; in which, 
for the first time, the immense vigor of popular en- 
thusiasm entered decisively into national development, 
and forced acceptance from statesmen and kings ; 
which was, accordingly, the boldest in plan, the widest 
in work, the most replete with constructive energy, 
which up to that time had been known in Europe. 
Fruitful schemes, strenuous struggles, extraordinary 
genius, amazing achievement, the decay of authority, 
the swift advance of popular power — these so crowd 
the annals of it that no brief narrative could give a 
summary of them. Long repressed tendencies came 
to sudden culmination. Hidden forces found vast 
development. The exuberant and out-breaking ener- 
gies of Christendom could no more be restrained 
within ancient limitations, than the lightnings, elabo- 
rated in hidden chambers of earth and sky, can be lock- 
ed in the clouds from which they leap. 

The invention of the movable type, a hundred years 

earlier, at Harlem or at Maintz, had made books the 

possession of many, where manuscripts had been the 

luxuiy of the few. Knowledge was distributed, and 

29 



Address. 

thought was interchanged, on this new vehicle, with a 
freedom, to a breadth, before unknown. The found- 
ing of Hbraries, the enlargement of universities, had 
given opportunity for liberal studies ; and the ancient 
world drew nearer to the modern, as the elegant letters 
of Greece and Rome made the genius and the action 
again familiar with which their times had been illus- 
trious. At the same time, the discovery of this conti- 
nent had expanded the globe to the minds of Euro- 
peans, and had opened new areas, the more exciting be- 
cause undetined, to their enterprise and hope. The 
popular imagination, in the early part of that age, was 
stirred by tales of sea-faring adventure as it had never 
been by the wildest fiction. The air was full of ro- 
mance and wonder, as savage forests, dusky figures, 
feathered crests, ornaments of barbaric gold, strange 
habitations, unheard-of populations, were lifted before 
the gaze of Europe, along the new Western horizon. 
Almost nothing appeared incredible. Grotius him- 
self, scholar, jurist, statesman as he was, cautious by 
nature, and trained in courts, was inclined to believe 
in an arctic race whose heads grew beneath their 
shoulders. El Dorado was to Raleigh as real a local- 
ity as the duchy of Devon. Even Caliban and Puck 
seemed almost possible persons, in an age so full of 
astounding revelations. 

But neither the magical art of printing, nor the dis- 
covery of the transatlantic continent, had stirred with 
such tumultuous force the mind of Christendom as 



hijluence of the Rcfon?iation, 

had the sudden Reformation of rehgion, starting in 
Germany, and swiftly extending through Northern 
Europe. To those who accepted it, this seemed a 
revival of Divine revelations. It brought the Most 
High to immediate personal operation upon them. 
As in the old prophetic days, the voice of speech came 
echoing forth, from the amber brightness which was 
as the appearance of the bow in the cloud. The in- 
stant privilege, the constant obligation, of every man 
to come to God, by faith in His Son ; the dignity of 
that personal nature in man for which this Son of 
God had died ; the vastness of the promises, whose 
immortal splendors interpreted the cross ; the regal 
right of every soul to communion, by the word, with 
the Spirit by whom that word was given : — these 
broke, like a flash from heights celestial, not only on 
the devout and the studious, but over the common life 
of nations. 

Before the force so swiftly and supremely inspired, 
whatever resisted it had to give way. It not only re- 
leased great multitudes of men into instant inde- 
pendence of the ancient dominant spiritual authority. 
It loosened the ligatures, or shattered the strength, of 
temporal tyrannies ; and its impulses went more wide- 
ly than its doctrines. In Italy and Spain, as well as in 
England, in the parts of Germany which retained 
their ancient allegiance to the Pontiff, as well as in 
those which had thrown this off, there was an unwont- 
ed stimulation in the air ; and the forces, of learning, 

31 



Add 7^ ess. 

of logic, or of amis, which fought against the Refor- 
mation, were themselves more eager and more effective 
because of the impulse which it had given. 

Commerce was extending, as letters and liberties 
were thus advancing. Inventions followed each other 
almost as swiftly, with almost as much of startling 
noveltv, as in our own time ; and the ever-increasinor 
consciousness of right, of opportunity, and of power, 
the sense of liberation, the expectation of magnificent 
futures — these extended among the peoples, with a 
rapidity, in a measure, before unknown. 

It was an age, therefore, not so much of destruction, 
as of paramount impulse to wide and bold enterprise. 
Vast hopes, vast works, imperial plans, were native to 
it. It was an age of detonating strife, but of study, 
too, and liberal thought ; of the noblest poetry, the 
most copious learning, a busy industry, a discursive 
philosophy, a sagacious statesmanship ; when astonish- 
ing discovery stimulated afresh magnificent enterprise ; 
when great actions crowded upon each other ; when 
the world seemed to have suddenly turned plastic, and 
to offer itself for man's rebuilding ; when each decade 
of years, to borrow an energetic expression of Brough- 
am, " staggered, under a load of events which had for- 
merly made centuries to bend." 

So far as the South of Europe is concerned, it is 

represented to us chiefly, certainly most pleasantly, by 

the great names, in literature or in fine art, by which 

it is distinguished ; Tasso, crowned at Rome, and 
32 



Renowned Men of the Century. 

Galileo, condemned -^ Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de 
Vega, in Spain ; Tintoretto, with his audacity of 
genius, and the lightning of his pencil ; Cagliari, bet- 
ter known as Paul Veronese, Guido Reni, the Ca- 
racci ; Velasquez, Murillo, and Salvator Rosa. It saw 
the close of Titian's life, and of Michael Angelo's. It 
saw the completion of the dome of St. Peter's. 

In Northern Europe great clusters of names also 
shine on the century, of men preeminent in science, 
letters, or the hne arts ; Kepler, Tycho Brahe ; Moliere, 
Racine, Rochefoucauld, Pascal ; Rubens, Rembrandt, 
Van Dyke, Claude Lorraine. Edmund Spenser, the 
' Prince of Poets,' as his monument describes him, till- 
ed his career in it ; Richard Hooker, Philip Sidney, 
Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, John Selden, Isaac 
Casaubon. It bears upon its brow, as it moves in the 
great procession of historic periods, the dazzling dia- 
dem of the name of Shakespeare. It saw the youth 
of Leibnitz, and of Newton. It heard the music of Mil- 
ton's verse. It saw the entire life of Descartes, the 
middle manhood of Spinoza. It watched Grotius 
from his birth to his burial, in the city of Delft. 

* The traveler to Rome, visiting the church of S. Maria SOPRA 
Minerva, will hardly fail to feel the propriety of its name, if it is recalled 
to him that in one of the halls of the monastery attached to it, then oc- 
cupied by the Inquisition, Galileo met his sentence, and pronounced his 
retraction : " I abjure, curse, and detest, the error and the heresy of the 
motion of the earth," etc. It startles one to remember that this was at 
as lat-e a date as June 22, 1633 ; five years before Harvard College was 
founded. The Inquisition itself has since seen the truth of the more 
celebrated words which the aged philosopher is said to have uttered, m 
an under tone, when rising from his knees. 

33 



Address^ 

The telescope came to light in it ; and brought to 
men's view vast whirls of suns, as if re-creating for 
them the heavens. The microscope was so perfected 
as to carry the sight, almost without exaggeration, from 
the infinitely great to the infinitely little, and to show 
the marvels of organization in. creatures so minute that 
a speck of dust is a mountain beside them. The ther- 
mometer, the barometer, the air-pump, the nature and 
use of electricity, the circulation of the blood — these 
are among its great discoveries. The mariner's com- 
pass was improved and illumined till it became al- 
most a new instrument. The first English newspaper 
had its origin in this century. Logarithms were in- 
vented. The Royal Exchange was opened in Lon- 
don. The Dutch and English East India Companies 
were established The globe was explored on every 
meridian, by the search of its discoveiy. It gained 
new luxuries^ as well as new arts, and was the first 
century sweetened in Europe by the manufacture of 
refined sugar, or soothed and stimulated by tobacco 
and coffee. 

Things like these are the surface indications of pro- 
digious forces working beneath ; like the specks or 
wreaths of glittering spume which are flung into the 
air, when immense currents rush into collision. But 
the intensity and the breadth of these forces are better 
represented by the national changes which the cen- 
tury witnessed. 

To look only at the states of Northern Europe, it 

34. 



Changes in JVaitons. 

saw the magnificent reign of Elizabeth, the great 
EngHsh Rebellion, the execution of Charles First, the 
ten years of the Commonwealth, the final return of 
Charles Second. It saw the Huguenot struggle in 
France, the stormy youth and the bsilliant govern- 
ment of Henry Fourth, the following reign of Louis 
Thirteenth, the earlier successes of Louis Fourteenth ; 
the long ministry of Sully, on whom Henry leaned 
with such justified confidence ; the triumph of Riche- 
lieu, who broke the power of feudalism on the one 
hand, of political protestantism on the other, and who 
" made his royal master," as Montesquieu said, " the 
second man in France, but the first in Europe ; hum- 
bling the king, while he exalted the monarchy." It 
saw the ministry, the marriage, and the death, of Car- 
dinal Mazarin. 

The forty years' reign of Philip Second filled nearly 
half of it. It witnessed the amazing revolt of the Neth- 
erlands, their successful resistance of all the Spanish 
fleets and forces, their final establishment of a Protestant 
Republic. It saw the regeneration of Sweden ; and it 
included, in its extraordinary and comprehensive annals, 
the whole course of the Thirty Years' War, with the 
sorrow and sacrifice which that involved, the heroic 
energies which it revealed, till it closed in the welcome 
peace of Westphalia. 

Another century so energized by great emergent 
opinions, so suddenly full of a vehement and conquer- 
ing public life, so prolific in enterprise, so swarming 

35 



Address. 

with productive force, one must look long to find. 
^ When we reach it in history we are conscious of step- 
ping out of the Past, into the modern hfe of Christen- 
dom. The patience, skill, inventive daring, of our civili- 
zation, were nfbre vitally a part of it than were its longest 
and fiercest conflicts. It fought, to get more room for 
work. Elemental rages darkened the heavens. The 
concussion of ethereal forces was constant. Yet the 
work of construction went always forward, and on the 
broadest national scale. New liberties were asserted 
and organized. New states came rounding into form. 
The descendants of the Batavians made the scanty 
lands which they had rescued from the wash of the 
sea, the seat of a history more majestic in its 
elements, both of tragedy and of triumph, than the 
Continent had seen, and the centre of a commerce 
which flung its tentacles around the globe. The Eng- 
lish fleets, in which Catholic and Protestant fought 
together, scattered the Armada, under skies that seem- 
ed to conspire for their help, and hit, as with ceaseless 
lightning strokes, the ships, and coasts, and power of 
Spain ; while all the time went widely on, with only 
indeed augmented impulse, the labor of inventors, 
the studies of scholars, the voyages of discoverers, the 
theologian's discussion, the painter's pencil, and the 
statesman's plan. 

So full of immense movement was the century, 
so opulent in achievement, so mighty in impulse, 

that the earth seemed freshly alive beneath it, the skies 
36 



Northern Europe full of life. 

burnished with prophetic gleams. The common peo- 
ple, for a time at least, had mastered their place in 
politics and society ; and the whole mind of Northern 
Europe was full of an intense stimulation. Education 
was wide. Plain men, like Governor Bradford, never 
trained in any university, were easy masters of five or 
six languages.* Farmers' sons, like Francis Drake, be- 
came great admirals. The enterprise of the time was 
not reckless or vague, but was the expression of this 
abounding, exuberant life, instructed by research, and 
guided by courageous wisdom. There was nothing 
factitious in the force of the century, as there is noth- 
ing deceptive in its fame. Alive in every fibre, with 
an exultant and stimulated life, Northern Europe sent 
forth its freshly-awakened, world-sweeping activities, as 
streams are shot into sudden motion when the Easter 
sun unlocks the ice. 

This was the century out of the midst of which the 
early settlers of this continent came ; whose eager 
energies came here with them. They were not its 
splendid representatives. No fleets of galleons brought 
them over. They came in coarse clothing, not in 
raiment of velvet, or gilded armor. They attracted 

* " He was a person for study, as well as action ; and hence, notwith- 
standing the difficulties through which he passed in his youth, he attained 
unto a notable skill in languages : the Dutch tongue was become al- 
most as vernacular to him as the English ; the French tongue he could 
also manage ; the Latin, and the Greek, he had mastered ; but the He- 
Ijrew he most of all studied, 'because,' he said, ' he would see with his 
own eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty.' " 

Mather's Magnalia. Book 2, Chap. I., § 9. 

37 



Address. 

little attention at the time. They only seemed to 
themselves to be doing a work which somehow had 
fallen to their lot, and which must be done ; and that 
the century which they represented would be more 
illustrious by reason of their action, was certainly a 
thought which never occurred to them. But they 
shared its life, if not its renown ; they brought its 
vigor, if not its wealth. Their small stockades, at 
Jamestown and Plymouth, at New Amsterdam and 
Fort Orange, were the points on our coast where that 
energetic and sovereign century, then passing over 
Europe, set up its banners. 

We never shall understand them, or their work, 
except this be before us. 

Recall, then, the England which the colonists left 
and represented. Elizabeth herself had been dead 
four years when they landed at Jamestown, and seven- 
teen years when they settled at Plymouth ; but the 
image of her imperious face was on most of the coins 
which they brought hither, and the niemories of her 
reign had a force more vital than the actual power of 
her successor. The middle-aged could well remember 
the camps, the watch-fires, the universal excitements, 
of the year of the Armada. The young might have 
read, upon broad-sheets, her " Golden Speech " to her 
last Parliament.* The older might have sailed with 

* " There seemed for a moment to be some danger that the long and 

glorious reign of Elizabeth would have a shameful and disastrous end. She, 

however, with admirable judgment and temper, declined the contest, put 

herself at the head of the reforming party, redress'ed the grievance, 

38 



The Reaction in England. 



ii 



Frobisher or Drake, or themselves have borne arms 
under the famous admirals and captains, who, at her 
inspiration, had fought with a triumphant energy on 
sea and land. 

The very temper which now strove to displace 
that earlier spirit only contributed to make it signal. 
Raleigh was beheaded October 29th, 1618 ; eleven 
years after Jamestown commenced, two years before 
the Mayflower's voyage. That was the last passionate 
blow of the vanquished Spain at the age of Elizabeth, 
whose energy and whose chivalry he represented. It 
showed the unsleeping animosity of the Spaniard ; but 
it also brought into startling exhibition the weakness 
and wickedness which were now on the throne from 
which the great daughter of Anne Boleyn had lately 
passed ; and the spatter of his blood smote every 
heart, which was loyal to the Past, with pain and rage. 
Carlyle has suggested that Oliver Cromwell was per- 
haps at that time living in London, a student of law, 
and may have been a spectator of the scene. Many 
others, who were afterward in this country, must have 
seen the gallant and cultured man whose youthful 
grace had attracted Elizabeth, and whose life had 
imaged the splendor of the age ; and a sharp sense of 

thanked the Commons, in touching and dignified language, for their ten- 
der care of the general weal, brought back to herself the hearts of the 
people, and left to her successors a memorable example of the way in 
which it behooves a ruler to deal with public movements which he has 
not the means of resisting." 

Macaulay: Hist, of England. Vol. I., page 63. 

39 



Address, 

the Nemesis in history may well have startled them 
when the son and successor of the royal assassin bowed 
his reluctant and haughty head beneath the axe, in 
front of Whitehall. 

The daring and inspiring spirit which had marked 
the preceding half-century was not destroyed, by the 
murder of one of its representatives, or by the treachery 
of another. A year after the landing at Plymouth, 
Thomas Wentworth, afterward known as Earl of 
Strafford, that ' great, brave, bad man,' whom Mac- 
aulay has pictured with a pencil so exquisite and so 
unrelenting, declared in Parliament, with vehement 
emphasis, that " the liberties, franchises, privileges, and 
jurisdictions of Parliament, are the ancient and un- 
doubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of 
England." That was then a passionate conviction in 
the House of Commons. Twenty years later, when 
he who then uttered it had been for twelve years its 
fierce antagonist, it caught him in its grasp, and swept 
him to the scaffold. The pre-Revolutionary struggle 
of our fathers had its prophecy in that sentence. Its 
seminal principle involved their whole contest. 

Before the Pilgrims sailed from Holland, he whom 

Elizabeth, forty years before, in the superb promise of 

his youth, had called her " young Lord Keeper," was 

Chancellor of England. His " Novum Organum " 

might have come to our shores with Bradford and 

Carver ; his later writings with Winthrop and Higgin- 

son. His immense influence on human thought syn- 
40 



Shakespeare, and Milton. 

chronises completely with the English settlements on 

our coast. The then new English version of the 

Scriptures was just in time to gild with its lights, of 

Hebrew story and Christian faith, the rude life on 

savage shores. Shakespeare had died, untimely, in 

1616 ; and the first collected edition of his plays was 

published in the year of the settlement of this city. 

How far the impulse and renown of his genius had 

preceded his death we cannot be sure ; but the children 

of those who had never read, who certainly had not 

seen his plays at the Blackfriars' or the Globe, have 

been debtors ever since to that supreme and visioned 

mind which reanimated the past, interpreted history, 

and searched the invisible spirit of man as if it were 

transparent crystal. Milton was a lad, twelve years 

old, when the Plymouth colony began, having been 

born, in 1608, in Bread street, London, under the 

armorial sign of the " Spread Eagle ; " and his public 

life was wholly accomplished within the period now 

under review, though it was not till later that the 

" Paradise Lost " was published in London, and the 

chequered and lofty life of the poet was closed in sleep. 

These names make the age which presents them 

majestic. But their chief importance to us, at this 

moment, is derived from the fact that they represent 

a popular life which preceded themselves, and which 

quickened the personal genius that surpassed it. The 

authors were the fountain-shafts, through which shot 

up, in flashing leap, the waters flowing from distant 

41 



Address. 

heights. With the various beauty, the incomDarable 
force, of their differing minds, they gave expression to 
impalpable influences of which the age itself was full. 

The same influences wrought in humbler men, who 
could not give them such expression. They were the 
vital inheritance of our fathers. The men of the English 
middle-class,— they were the men from the loins of 
whose peers, and whose possible associates, Raleigh, 
and Shakespeare, and Milton, had sprung. They could 
not, many of them, read the Latin of the " De Aug- 
mentis." They might not appreciate the cosmic com- 
pleteness of Shakespeare's mind, or the marvellous 
beauty of Comus and L'Allegro. But they incorpor- 
ated, more than others, the essential spirit of that pro- 
lific, prophetic age, which had found its voice in these 
supreme writers. They had breathed from infancy 
that invigorating air which was full of discovery, enter- 
prise, hope, of widened learning, popular enthusiasm, 
a fresh and vivid Christian faith. They had felt the 
inrush of that vehement life which for sixty years 
had been sweeping over England ; and the irrepressible 
temper of the time, which gave birth to the letter^, 
impulse to the discovery, law to the statesmanship, 
life to the religion, of the age of Elizabeth, was as 
much a part of them as their bones and their blood. 

They came, in large part, because they represented 
that spirit ; because it seemed to them likely thence- 
forth to be less common and governing in England ; 
and because they would rather encounter the seas, and 
4a 



TJic Dutch, and Walloons. 

face the perils and pains of the wilderness, than tariy 
in a country where James was king, and George 
Villiers was minister. When Endicott cut out the 
cross at Salem from the banner of England, he ex- 
pressed a temper as old and as stubborn as the fights 
against Spain. When Wadsworth, fifty years later, 
seized the charter of Connecticut, and hid it in the 
Wyllys' oak, he did precisely what the English tradi- 
tions of a century earlier had enjoined as his duty. 
And wiien the discerning Catholics of Maryland 
accepted religious freedom in their colony, they only 
expressed anew the spirit in which their fathers had 
fought the Armada, though the pontiff had blessed it, 
in their loyalty to a Queen against whom he had pro- 
claimed a crusade. 

It is never to be forgotten that that wonderful century, 
which saw at its beginning the coronation of Eliza- 
beth, and at its end the death of Cromwell — the age 
of Grenville, Raleigh, Drake, of Bacon, Shakespeare, 
and the manhood of Milton — that was the century, in 
which the arts and arms of England, its resolute tem- 
per, and its sagacious and liberal life, were solidly 
planted upon these shores. 

The powerful element brought from Holland, by the 
Dutch and the Walloons, was only the counterpart of 
this. An eminent American has made it familiar, in 
our time, to all who admire heroism in action, and 
eloquence in story. 

Mr. Motley has said of William the Silent, that 

43 



Address. 

" his efforts were constant to elevate the middle-class ; 
to build up a strong third party, which should unite 
much of the substantial wealth and intelligence of the 
land, drawing constantly from the people, and deriving 
strength from national enthusiasm, — a party which 
should include nearly all the political capacity of the 
country ; and his efforts were successful." * " As to the 
grandees,they were mostly of those who sought to 'swim 
between tw^o waters,' according to the Prince's expres- 
sion." The boers, or laborers, were untrained and coarse, 
not the material with which to erect an enduring com- 
monwealth ; and on this stalwart middle-class, trained by 
churches and common-schools, skillful in enterprise, 
patient in industry, fervent in patriotism, unconquerable 
in courage, the illustrious patriot depended, under God, 
for the safety of his country. 

Among the inhabitants of the province of New 
Netherland, when it came into the English possession, 
were many representing this class. The early servants 
of the West India Company had been succeeded by 
farmers and traders. The patroons of the vast and in- 
definite manors had, for the most part, tarried at 
home, and their titles had largely been extinguished. 
The colonists then here, — agriculturists, mechanics, 
sailors, dealers — represented fairly the commercial, 
political, social spirit, which was prevalent in Holland ; 
and while wolves and Indians filled the forests, which 
then extended from Canal Street to Harlem, the life 

* Rise of the Dutch Republic. Vol. III., page 219. 
44 



Attitude of the Netherlands. 

in the two separated settlements was much the same 
as in the equal contemporaneous villages of the Father- 
land. Maurice — for whom the Hudson River had first 
been named — was Stadtholder of the Netherlands, 
when the permanent settlement was made here ; and 
the clouded lustre of his great name was still vivid 
with a gleam from the past. Only two years before, 
the contest with Spain had re-commenced. During the 
preceding twelve years' armistice, the United Nether- 
lands had passed through a disastrous interval, of 
religious dissension, ambitious intrigue, and popular 
tumult. But that was now ended ; and the first 
stroke of the Spanish arms, under Spinola, had revived 
the magnificent tradition of the days when, as their 
historian has said, " the provinces were united in one 
great hatred, and one great hope." The interval of 
peace had not softened the stubborness of their purpose 
to be free. They were ready again ' to pass through 
the sea of blood, that they might reach the promised 
land ; ' and all that was inspiring in the annals of 
two preceding generations came out to instant exhibi- 
tion, as hidden pictures are drawn forth by fire. 

The earlier years of Maurice himself, when the twig 
was becoming the tree — " tandem fit surculus arbor;" 
his following victories, when the renowned Spanish 
commanders were smitten by him into utter rdut, as 
at Nieuport and at Turnhout ; the fatal year of the 
murder of his father, when the ' nation lost its guiding- 
star, and the little children cried in the streets ; ' the 

45 



Address. 

frightful " Spanish fury " at Antwerp ; the siege of 
Leyden, and the young university which commemo- 
rated the heroism of those who had borne it; the siege 
of Harlem, and all the rage and agony of its close : — 
these things came up, and multitudes more — the whole 
panorama in which these were incidents — when the 
Spaniards sought, in 1622, to open the passage into 
the North by capturing the town of Bergen-op-Zoom, 
and when Maurice relieved it. The temper which 
this tremendous experience, so intense and prolonged, 
had bred in the Hollanders — the omnipresent, inde- 
structible spirit, not wholly revealed in any one per- 
son, but partly in millions — this was again as vigorous 
as ever, throughout the Republic which it had created, 
when the thirty families came to this island, when the 
two hundred persons were resident here, in 1625. 

Some of those then here, more who followed, were 
of the same class, the same occupation and habit of 
life, with those who had fought for sixty years, on sea 
and land, against the frenzied assaults of Spain ; who, 
under Heemskirk, had smitten her fleet into utter de- 
struction, beneath the shadow of Gibraltar ; who had 
fought her ships on every wave, and had blown up 
their ow^n rather than let her flag surmount them ; 
who had more than once opened the dykes, and wel- 
comed" the sea, rather than yield to the Spanish pos- 
session the lands thus drowned ; who had ravaged the 
coasts, and captured the colonies, of the haughty Pe- 
ninsula ; and who, in the midst of all this whirlwind of 
46 



Educati07i in the Netherlands. 

near and far battle, had been inausfuratinor new formi 
of Government, cultivating religion, advancing edu- 
cation, developing the arts, draining the lakes, and or- 
ganizing a commerce that surrounded the world. 

When the four Dutch forts were established — ^at this 
point,* at Harlem, at Fort Orange, on the Delaware, 
— this spirit was simply universal in Holland; and 
those who came hither could not but bring it, unless 
they had dropped their identity on the way. They 
came for trade. They came to purchase lands by 
labor ; to get what they could from the virgin soil, 
and send peltries and timber back to Holland. But 
they brought the patience, the enterprise and the cour- 
age, the indomitable spirit, and the hatred of tyranny, 
into v/hich they had been born, into which their na- 
tion had been baptized with blood. 

Education came with them ; the free schools, in 
which Holland had led the van of the world, beins: 
early transplanted to these shores ; a Latin school be- 
ing established here in 1659, to which scholars were 
sent from distant settlements. * An energetic 
Christian faith came with them, with its Bibles, its 
ministers, its interpreting books. Four years before, 
Grotius, imprisoned in the castle of Louvestein, had 

* " It is very pleasant to reflect that the New England pilgrims, during 
their residence in the glorious country of your ancestry, found already 
established there a system of schools which John of Nassau, eldest 
brother of William the Silent, had recommended in these words : ' You 
must urge upon the States General that they should establish free schools, 
where children of quality, as well as of poor families, for a very small 
sum, could be well and Christianly educated and brought up. This 

47 



Address. 

written his notes upon the Scriptures, and that treatise 
on the Truth of the Christian Relimon which, within 
the same century, was translated from the original 
Dutch into Latin, English, French, Flemish, German, 
Swedish, Persian, Arabic, the language of Malacca, and 
modern Greek. He had written it, he says', for 
the instruction of sailors ; that they might read it in 
the leisure of the voyage, as he had written it in the 
leisure of confinement, and might carry the impression 
of that Christianity whose divinity it affirmed, around 
the globe. Copies of it may easily have come hither 
in the vessels of the nation which had no forests, but 
which owned more ships than all Europe beside. 

The political life of the Hollanders had come, as 
well as their commercial spirit, and their decisive re- 
ligious faith. They loved the liberty for which they 
and their fathers had tenaciously fought. They saw 
its utilities, and understood its conditions ; and if you 
recall the motto of the Provinces, in their earlier strug- 
gle — " Concordia, res parvce crescunt ; Discordza, 
inaximoe dilabuntttr " — and if you add a pregnant sen- 
tence from their Declaration of Independence, made in 
July, 1 581, I think you will have some fair impression 
of the influences which afterward wrought in this 

would be the greatest and most useful work you could ever accomplish, 
for God and Christianity, and for the Netherlands themselves.' . . . 
This was the feeling about popular education in the Netherlands, during 
the i6th century." 

Mr. Motley's Letter to St. Nicholas Society ; quoted in Address of 
Hon. J. W. Beekman, 1869, pp. 30, 31. 
48 



Declaration of Independence. 

land, transported hither by those colonists. " When 
the Prince," says that Declaration, " does not fulfil his 
duty as protector, when he oppresses his subjects, des- 
troys their ancient liberties, and treats them as slaves, 
he is to be considered not a Prince, but a Tyrant. As 
such, the Estates of the land may lawfully and reason- 
ably depose him, and elect another in his place."* They 
did not elect another to the place ; but, renouncing 
their allegiance to Philip, as their children did after- 
ward to George Third, they founded a Republic, which 
lasted on those oozy plains two hundred years. 

The very temper which afterward spoke in the pub- 
lic documents issued from Philadelphia, had been 
uttered in Holland two centuries earlier; and they 
who came hither from that land of dykes, storks, and 
windmills, had brought it as part of their endowment. 
No master-pieces came with them, of Rubens or Rem- 
brandt, whose genius flourished in the same century, 
under the skies lurid with battle, and on the soil fattened 
with blood No wealth came with them, like thut 
which already was making Amsterdam — " the Venice 
of the North " — one of the richest towns in Europe. 
They built a stone chapel, in i642f ; but they could not 
reproduce on these shores a single one of the scores of 
churches, stately and ancient, which they had left, nor 

* Rise of Dutch Republic. Vol. III., page 509. 

t " A contract was made with John and Richard Ogden, of Stamford, 
for the reason-work of a stone church, seventy-two feet long, fifty wide, 
and sixteen high, at a cost of twenty-five hundred guilders, and a gratuity 
of one hundred more if the work should be satisfactory^ The walls were 

49 



Address. 

any of those superb civic palaces in which the Nether- 
land cities were rich. But amid whatever straitness of 
poverty, amid whatever simplicity of mannei-s, how- 
ever unconscious of it themselves, they brought the 
immanent moral life which had made the morasses at 
the mouth of the Rhine the centre of a traffic more 
wide and lucrative, the scene of a history more majes- 
tic, than Europe before had ever seen, and the seat of 
the first enlightened Republic on all the circuit of its 
maritime coast. 

To these two elements, the English and tlie Dutch, 
was added a vivid and graceful force by those who came 
from the fruitful Protestant provinces of France^ It is 
sometimes forgotten that the Huguenots constituted 
the larger and wealthier part of the population of New 
Amsterdam, after the Dutch ; so that La Montaigne 
had been in a measure associated with Kieft in the gov- 
ernment here, as early as 1638 ; so that public docu- 
ments, before t 664, were ordered to be printed in the 
French language, as well as in the Dutch. They 
brought with them industry, arts, refinement of letters, 
as well as the faithful and fervent spirit which had 
been infused into them in the chambi'cs ardentcs of 
their»long persecutions. 

They were, probably, more generally a cultivated 
class than were the colonists from either EnHand or 

o 

s.oon built ; and the roof was raised, and covered by Eng-lish carpenters 
with oak shingles, which, by exposure to the weather, sooa 'looked Uke 
slate.' " 

Brodhead's Hist, of New York.. Vol. I., pp. 336-70. 
50 



Hucritenot movement in France. 



<i 



Holland. The Huguenot movement had begun in 
France, not among the poorer people, but in the capi- 
tal, and in the university. The revival of letters had 
given it primary impulse. It was scholastic, as well 
a^ devout, and so was fitly signaled and served by the 
most philosophical system of theology elaborated in 
Europe. Its ministers v/ere among the most learned 
and eloquent in that country and century of eloquent 
preachers. It had counted distinguished nobles in its 
ranks ; Condc, and Coligni, among its leaders. Mar- 
imcrite, Oueen of Navarre, had been in her time the 
centre of it. It was intimately connected w^ith the 
high politics of the realm. It had control of abundant 
wealth. The commerce of the kingdom, and itv finest 
manufactures, were largely in the hands of those who 
composed the eight hundred Huguenot churches found 
in France in the early part of the seventeenth century. 
The families of this descent who were early in New 
York — some of them as early as 1625 — and who were 
afterward in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, 
South Carolina, brought with them thus an ancestral 
influence of education, refinement, and skillful enter- 
prise, as well as of religious fidelity. The French vivacity 
blended in them with a quick and careful sense of duty. 
They brought new arts, and graceful industries, a cer- 
tain chivalric and cultivated tone; while the right to 
freedom, in the v/orship of God, and in the conduct of 
civil affairs, was as dear to them as to any of those whose 
fortunes they shared. This spirit had compelled respect 



51: 



Address. 

in the land which they left, from those who hated it 
most intensely. For nearly ninety years it had made it 
indispensable to maintain there the edict which secured 
to them religious rights. When that was repealed, 
w^ith the frightful dragonnades which met such ghastly 
retribution in the streets of Paris, a hundred years after, 
half-a-million of the citizens of France pushed across 
its guarded frontiers into voluntary exile, while the 
fiery spirit of those who remained blazed forth in the 
war of the Camisards, unextinguished among the Cev- 
ennes for twenty years. 

Such an element of population was powerful, here, 
beyond its numbers. Its trained vitality made it effi- 
cient. It is a familiar fact that of the seven Presidents 
of the Continental Congress, three were of this Hugue- 
not lineage : Boudinot, Laurens, and John Jay. Of 
the four commissioners who signed the provisional 
treaty at Paris, which assured our independence, two 
were of the same number : Laurens, and Jay. Faneuil, 
whose hall in Boston has been for more than a hundred 
years the rallying-place of patriotic enthusiasm, was the 
son of a Huguenot. Marion, the swamp-fox of Caro- 
lina, was another; Horry, another; Huger, another. 
It was a Huguenot voice, that of Duche, which open- 
ed with prayer the Continental Congress. It was a 
Huguenot hand, that of John Laurens, which drew the 
articles of capitulation at Yorktown. Between these 
two terminal acts, the brilliant and faithful bravery of 
the soldier had found wider imitation, among those of 

5^ 



The SzvedisJi Emigration. 

his lineage, than had the cowardly weakness of the 
preacher; and two of those, who thirty years after, 
in 1814, signed the treaty of peace at Ghent, were still 
of this remarkable stock — James Bayard, and Albert 
Gallatin. 

Whenever the history of those who came hither 
from La Rochelle, and the banks of the Garonne, is 
fully written, the value and the vigor of the force which 
they imparted to the early American public life will 
need no demonstration. 

The Swedes and Germans, who also were here, though 
in smaller numbers, represented the same essential tem- 
per, and were in radical harmony of spirit with those 
by whose side they found their place. Gustavus Vasa 
had given to Sweden comparative order, and initial 
prosperity; leaving it, at his death, with various indus- 
tries, a considerable trade, and important institutions 
of education and religion. Gustavus Adolphus gave 
to the country thus partially regenerated an eminence 
as signal as it was brief in European affairs. A typi- 
cal Northman, with his fair skin, clear gray eyes, and 
the golden hair which crowned his gigantic stature, he 
broke upon Germany in the midst of the agony of 
its Thirty Years' War, beat back the imperial ban- 
ners from their near approach to the German Ocean, 
and, in two years of rapid victory, turned the entire 
current of the strife. He swept fortresses into his 
gi-asp, as the reaper binds his sheaves. The armies of 

Tilly were pulverized before him. He entered Munich 

53 



Address. 

in triumph ; Nuremberg and Naumburg amid a wel- 
come that frightened him, it was so much like worship. 
And when he died, accidently killed in the fog at 
Liitzen, in 1632, he left the most signal example in 
modern times of heroic design, of far-sighted audacity, 
of the conquering force which lies in faith. 

When he left Sweden he said to his chancellor: 
" Henceforth there remains for me no rest, except the 
eternal ; " and it was true. But, before he left, he had 
not only founded a university at home, and given 
large impulse to industry and to commerce, but had 
chartered a colony for this country, with liberal pro- 
vision, and an unbounded faith and hope. After his 
death, the great minister, Oxenstiern — most prescient 
and masterful of the statesmen of the time — furthered 
the colony, and would have built it into greatness, but 
for the subsequent decline of the kingdom, under the 
eccentric and self-willed Christina. Then it was ab- 
sorbed, as you know, by the Dutch. But so far as it 
contributed, as to some extent it did, to the early 
civilized life on these shores, it simply augmented the 
previous forces, of personal energy, public education, 
constructive skill, and a free faith, for which the woods 
had here retired to make room ; and the fact that it 
was planned by him whose flashing fame filled 
Europe with amaze, connects it with heroic memories, 
and casts a certain reflected splendor upon our early 
popular life. 

The Germans, who speedily followed the Swedes, 
54 



The Ger77:ctn Emigration. 

though their large immigration was later in beginning, 
were of the same spirit. T\\q war, which had covered 
a whole generation, in which three- fourths of the 
people had perished, and three-fourths of the houses 
had been destroyed, — which had given, as Archbishop 
Trench points out, the new word " plunder " to the 
English language,* and which had been marked by 
atrocities so awful that history shudders to recite them, 
• — had not, after all, exterminated the temper at which 
it was aimed. It had given, as Trench has also 
observed, the largest contribution of any period to 
the Protestant hymn-book of Germany. Those who 
survived it, while fiercer than ever against the tyran- 
nies which they had fought, were more eager than 
ever to replace the prosperities which the war had 
destroyed. The wilderness around them, which man 
had made, was less inviting than the wilderness beyond 
seas, which God had left for man to conquer. So 
they came hither ; bringing with them the courage, 
the purpose, and the hope, which all the fire that ran 
along the ground, and the iron hail that had broken 
the branches of every tree, had only burned and 
beaten deeper into their minds. 

They came for expanded opportunity ; for liberty of 
development, and the chance of a more rewarding 

* " This War has left a very characteristic deposite in our langnag-e, 
in the word ' plunder,' which first appeared in English about the year 
1642-3, having- bee;-) brought hither from Germany by some of the many 
Scotch and English who had served therein ; for so Fuller assures us." 

Lect. on "Social Aspects of the Thirty Years' War." 



Address. 

work. Wherever they touched the American coast 
they set the seeds of that new civiHzation which had 
found in Germany its early incentives, and for which 
they and their fathers had fought, through a strife 
without precedent in severity and in length. 

The same was true of the Scotch and Scotch-Irish, 
who came in rapidly increasing numbers after the 
close of the seventeenth century. The Earl of Stir- 
ling had received, by royal charter, as early as 162 1, a 
grant of the territory still known to the world as 
" Nova Scotia," and had subsequently sent some colo- 
nists to its shores ; but the small settlement soon disap- 
peared, and those who afterward emigrated from 
Scotland, for many years, were inclined to seek 
homes in the north of Ireland, rather than on these 
distant coasts. The comparatively few families from 
the lowland shires, who had come hither before 
1664, had mingled inseparably with the English emi- 
grants, whom they closely resembled, and are scarcely 
to be discriminated from them.* 

The four or five hundred Scotch prisoners whom 
Cromwell sent to Boston, in [651, after the battles of 
Dunbar and Worcester, were, of course, discontented 
in their involuntary exile, and appear to have left no 

* " The population of Scotland (1603), with the exception of the 
Celtic tribes which were thinly scattered over the Hebrides, and over 
the mountainous parts of the northern shires, was of the same blood 
with the population of England, and spoke a tongue which did not differ 
from the purest English more than the dialects of Somersetshire and 
Lancashire differed from each other." 

Macaulay, History of Englaad, vol i, page 65. 
S6 



The Scotch-Irish Emigration, 

permanent impression on the unfolding life of the 
colonies. When Robert Barclay, of Ury, was gov- 
ernor of New Jersey, in 1683, he secured the emigra- 
tion of numbers of his countrymen to that attractive 
and fertile province, though, it is said, "with some 
difficulty and importunity. For, although the great 
bulk of the nation was suffering the rigors of tyranny, 
for their resistance to the establishment of prelacy, they 
were reluctant to seek relief in exile from their 
native land." * 

But when the hundred and twenty families came, 
in 1 719, to Boston^ Portland, and elsewhere, the an- 
cestors of whom, a century before, had emigrated from 
Argyleshire to Londonderry and Antrim in the north 
of Ireland, and by part of whom Londonderry, in New 
Hampshire, was speedily settled, — and when others 
followed, as to Georgia in 1736, to North Carolina in 
1746, to South Carolina in 1763, — they came to stay. 
They changed their skies, but not their minds. They 
brought the exact and stern fidelity to religious con- 
viction, the national pride, the hatred of tyranny, the 
frugal, hardy, courageous temper which were to them 
an ancestral inheritance. Their strong idiosyncrasy 
maintained itself stubbornly, but their practical spirit 
was essentially in harmony with that of the colonists 
who had preceded them ; and when the hour of sum- 
mons came, no voices were earlier or more emphatic 
for dissolving all connection with Great Britain than 

* Gordon's History of New Jersey, chap, IV. 

57 



Address. 

were those of the men whose ancestors, in 1638, had 
eagerly signed the " National Covenant " in the Grey- 
friars' church-yard, or forty years afterward had faced 
Claverhouse and his dragoons at Loudon-hill, or 
Monmouth and his troops at Both well-bridge. 

So, also, the Bohemian protestants, who were here 
in 1656; the Waldenses, who were on Staten Island 
and elsewhere in the same year ; the German quakers, 
by whom Germantown, in Pennsylvania, was settled, 
in 1684 ; the three thousand Germans, sent out to the 
Hudson River in 1710, and who afterward established 
their prosperous homes at Schoharie, and along the 
inviting Mohawk meadows ; the Salzburg exiles, who 
had crossed Europe from Augsburg " singing psalms," 
and who finally found a hone in Georgia, in i 734 : — 
all were essentially similar in spirit, industrious, order- 
ly, devout, faithful to their religion, with a resolute 
purpose to live and work in unhindered freedom. 
Each small migration addei its increment to the 
svv^elling force of the various bur sympathetic popula- 
tion of the colonies. Each element had its separate 
value, its proper strength ; and all were ready, when 
the final fires of war broke forth, to combine with each 
other, as the many metals, fused together and inti- 
matel}" commingling, were wrought into one magnifi- 
cent amalgam, in the famous and precious Corinthian 
brass. 

Even the rough and rapid outline of this fragment- 
ary review illustrates the extent to which the century 
58 



The Nation commenced. 

passing so signally over Europe impressed its charac-. 
ter on this continent. Twenty-five years after New 
Amsterdam had been submitted to the English, at 
least two hundred thousand Europeans are computed 
to have had their home in this country, representing', 
for the most part, the several peoples which I have 
named. The future Nation was then fully commenced. 
It had only thenceforth to work, and i2:row. It was 
formed of plain people. Its wealth vv^as small, and its 
culture not great. It had been hardly noticed, at first, 
amid the swift changes of states and dynasties with 
which Europe was dazzled. But the forces which it 
contained represented an illustrious ancestry. It is no 
exaggeration to say that the most encro^etlc life of the 
v/orld, up to that era, w^as reproduced in it. We have 
thought of it, too commonly, as composed of men who 
had simply come here in zeal for an opinion, or to 
escape the fierce inquest of tyranny. It was a broader 
temper which brought them, an ampler purpose 
which they came to serve. The push of a century was 
behind them ; eager, aggressive, sweeping out to new 
conquests on unknown coasts. It had seen such 
changes in Northern Europe as only its vehement 
energy could have wrought ; and now% with seemingly 
careless hand, using the impulse of various motives, it 
had flung into space a separate people, infused with its 
temper, alive with its force. 

In its constituent moral life, that people was one, 
though gradually formed, and drawn from regions so 

59 



Address. 

remote. Tt was fearless, reflective, energetic, construc- 
tive, by its birthright ; at once industrious and martial ; 
intensely practical, politically active, religiously free. 
There was, almost, a monotony o\ force in it. It 
accepted no hereditary leaders, and kept those whom 
it elected within careful limitations. It gave small 
promise of esthetic sensibility, with the dainty touch 
of artistic taste ; but it showed from the outset a swift 
and far-sighted common-sense. It was vital with ex- 
pectation ; having the strongest ancestral attachments, 
yet attracted by the Future more than by the Past, 
and always looking to new success and larger work. 
It was hospitable, of course, to all new comers, giving 
reception in New England, as well as here, to even 
the Jesuit and his mass; * but it absorbed only what 
harmonized with it, was indifferent to the rest. It 
was sensible of God, and His providence over it ; but 
entirely aware of the value of possessions, and pro- 
foundly resolved to have the power which they impart. 
It was the heir to a great Past. It had before it the 
perilous uncertainties of an obscure Future. But any 
philosopher, considering it at that point, with a mind 
as intent and reflective as Burke's, would have said, I 
think, without hesitation, that its Future must respond 
to the long preparation ; that the times before it must 
match the times out of which it had come, and take 
impress from the lands whose tongues and temper it 
combined. If that strong stock, selected from so 

* See Parkman's "Jesuits of North America," pp. 322-327. 
60 



The Training of the Nation. 

many peoples, and transferred to this continent at 
that critical time, was not destined thenceforth to 
grow, till the little one became a thousand, and the 
small one a strong nation, there is no province for 
anticipation in public affairs, and " the philosophy of 
history " is a phrase without meaning. 

The after-training which met it here was precisely 
such, you instantly observe, as befitted its origin, and 
carried on the development which was prophesied in 
its nature, [t was an austere, protracted training ; not 
beautiful, but b^'ncficent ; of labor, patience, legislation, 
war. As the colonies had been planted according 
to the wise maxim of Bacon — " the people wherewith 
you plant ought to be gardeners, ploughmen, laborers, 
smiths, carpenters, joiners, fishermen, fowlers, with 
some few apothecaries, surgeons, cooks, and bakers," * 
— so they were trained for practical service, for long 
endurance, for the arts of industry not of beauty, for 
ultimate oneness as a Nation, and a powerful impres- 
sion upon mankind. 

Incessant labor was their primary teacher ; universal 
in its demands, in effect most salutary. If they had 
been idle men, supplied with abundant resources from 
abroad, a something mystical and dark would have 
penetrated their spirit, from the pathless forests which 
stretched around, from the lonely seas which lay behind, 
from the fierceness of the elements, from their sen e 
of dislocation from all familiar historic lands. There 

* Essay xxsiii. ; " of Plantations." 

6i 



Address. 

was, in fact, something of this. Certain passages in 
their history, certain parts of their writings, are only 
explained by it. It would have been general, and 
have wrought a sure public decline, except for the 
constant corrective of their labor. They would have 
seen, oftener than they did, phantom armies fighting 
in the clouds, fateful omens in aurora and comet."^" The 
dread of witchcraft, still prevalent in the old world, 
would more widely have fevered their minds. The 
voice of demons would have oftener been heard, in 
the howl of wolves, or the winds wailing among the 
pines. But the sweat of their brows medicined their 
minds. The work which was set for them was too 
difficult and vast to allow such tendencies to get 
domination. 

A continent was before them to be subdued, and 
with few and poor instruments. With axe 'and hoe, 
mattock and plough, they were to conquer an unde- 
fined wilderness, untouched, till then, by civilized in- 
dustry ; with no land behind to which to retreat, 
with only the ocean and the sand-hills in the rear. 

It was a tremendous undertaking ; greater than any 

* " The Aurora Borealis, the beauty of the northern sky, which is now 
gazed upon with so much delight, was seen for the first time in New 
England in 1721, and filled the inhabitants with alarm. Superstition b?- 
held with terror its scarlet hues, and transformed its waving folds of 
light, moving like banners along the sky, into harbingers of coming 
judgment, and omens of impending havoc. Under its brilliant reflection, 
the snow, the trees, and every object, seemed to be dyed with blood, and 
glowed like fire." 

Barstow's Hist, of New Hampshire, chap. vii. 
62 



The Continent to be subdued. 

infant people had ever encountered ; greater, fortunate- 
ly, than they themselves knew at the time. Plutarch 
tells us that Stasicrates once proposed to Alexander 
to have Mount Athos carved into a statue of himself ; 
a copious river flowing from one hand, and a city of 
thousands of people in the other ; the yEgean archi- 
pelago stretching outvv^ard from the feet. Even the 
ambition which decreed Alexandria, and made Asia 
its vassal, might have pleased itself with a fancy so 
colossal. But it was trifling, compared with the work 
which the colonists of this country were called to take 
up ; as a Macedonian bay, compared with the ocean 
on which their rugged continent looked. Upon that 
continent they were to impress the likeness of them- 
selves. What Europe had only partially realized, after 
its centuries of advancing civilization, they and their 
children were suddenly to repeat, fashioning the wil- 
derness to the home of commonwealths. 

The strain of the work was prodigious and unceas- 
ing. No wonder that the applications of science have 
always had a charm for Americans ! No wonder that 
" impossible " has ever since seemed here a foolish word ! 
But the muscle which was built, in both body and 
will, was as tough and tenacious as the work was 
enormous. 

They had to secure, — by invention, where English 
policy permitted, by purchase, where it did not, — what- 
ever they needed for the comfort of life, and whatever 

means of culture they possessed Their fisheries were 

63 



Addres^s, 

pushed along the jagged, tempestuous coasts^ till they 
struck the icy barriers of the pole. Their commerce 
was cultivated, against the jealousy of the English legis- 
lation, till, in Burke's time, you see to what it had 
grown. They had to establish their ow^n free schools ; 
to found and enlarge their needed colleges ; to supply 
themselves with such literature at home as could be 
produced, in the pauses of their • prodigious labor ; to 
import from the old world what their small means en- 
abled them to buy. 

They had their chartered liberties to maintain, against 
Royal hostility, in the face of governors who hindered 
and threatened, if they did not — like Andros — compel 
the clerks of their assemblies to write " Finis" midway 
on the records. '''' So it happened to them, according to 
Milton's ideal plan for a perfect education. " The next 
remove," he says, " must be to the study of politics ; 
to know the beginning, end, and reason of political 
societies ; that they may not, in a dangerous fit of the 
Commonwealth, be such poor, shaken, uncertain reeds, 
of such a tottering conscience, as many of our great 
counselors have lately showed themselves, but stead- 
fast pillars of the State." The plain men who had 
come here from Europe, and who had before them a 

*''^His ExceHency, Sir Edmund Andros, Knight, Captain-General 
and Governor of his Majesty's Territory and Dominion in New England, 
by order from his Majesty, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 
the 31st of October, 1687, took into his hands the government of this 
colony of Connecticut, it being by his Majesty annexed to the Massachu- 
setts and other Colonies, under his Excellency's government. FINIS." 

Secretary's AlLya's recoxd ;. quoted by Palfrey, voL 3^ p. 545. 
64 



Military training of the Colonists. 

wilderness to be conquered, were trained according to 
this generous philosophy. A large practical sover- 
eignty had to be in their hands, from the beginning, for 
their self-preservation. They established offices, enacted 
laws, organized a militia, waged war, coined money ; 
and the lessons which they learned, of legislative 
prudence, administrative skill, bore abundant fruit in 
that final Revolution which did not spring from 
accident or from passion, which was born of debate, 
which was shaped by ideas, and which vindicated 
itself by majestic State-papers. 

Their military tuition was as constant as their work. 
Against the Indians, against the French, somewhere 
or other, as we look back, they seem to have been always 
in arms — so uncertain and brief were their intervals 
of peace. Not always threatened violence to them- 
selves, sometimes the remote collisions and entanele- 
ments of European politics, involved them in these 
wars — as in that great one which commenced in the 
question of the Austrian Succession, and which swept 
through our untrodden woods its trail of fire ; when, 
as Macaulay says of Frederick, " that he might rob a 
neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men 
fought on the coasts of Coromandel, and red men 
scalped each other by the great lakes of North 
America." Precisely as the colonies grew, any power 
hostile to Great Britain was incited to attack them. 
At some point or other, therefore, the straggling 

and interrupted line of their scanty possessions was 

65 



Address. 

lighted with conflagration, vocal with volleys, drip- 
ping with blood, down almost to the day of the Revo- 
lution. 

But from this incessant martial training came prac- 
tised skill in the use of weapons, a cool courage, a 
supreme self-reliance, — the temper which looks from 
many portraits, which faced emergencies without a 
fear, and whose fire withered the British ranks at 
Concord-bridge and on Breed's-hill. 

There is not much that is picturesque in the annals 
which cover the hundred years after New Amsterdam 
became New York. They look, to the world, perhaps 
to us, for the most part, common-place. Volcanic 
regions are the more picturesque in landscape forms, 
because of the sudden violence of the forces which 
have shattered and reset them. The legends cling to 
rugged peaks. The pinnacles of Pilatus incessantly 
attract them, while they sHde from the smoother slopes 
of Righi. So a convulsive and violent history, full 
of reaction, fracture, catastrophe, appeals to the imag- 
ination as one never does that is quiet and gradual, 
where a people moves forward in steady advance, and 
the sum of its accomplishment is gradually built of 
many particulars. There was not much in the career 
of the colonists, in the hundred years before the 
Revolution, which poetry would be moved to cele- 
brate, or whose attractive pictorial aspects the painter 
would make haste to sketch. 

But the discipline answered its purpose better than 

66 



The severe Discipline salutary, 

if it had been pictorial, tragic. It was apt to the in- 
born temper of the colonists. It fortified in them 
that hardy and resolute moral life which they had 
brought. It guarded the forces which were their birth- 
right from w^aste and loss. The colony of Surinam, 
under tropical skies — where mahogany was a firewood, 
and the Tonquin-bean, with its swift sweetness, per- 
fumed the air ; where sugar and spices are produced 
without limit, and coffee and cotton have returned 
to the planter two crops a year — this seemed, at the 
time, a prodigal recompense for the colony of New 
Netherland. But Guiana demoralized the men who 
possessed it ; while the harder work, under harsher 
heavens, gave an empire to those who adhered to these 
coasts. No unbought luxuries became to them as 
dazzling and deadly Sabine gifts. No lazy and volup- 
tuous life, as of tropical islands, dissolved their man- 
hood. Their little wealth was wrested from the 
wilderness, or won from the seas ; and the cost of its 
acquirement measured its permanence. They were, as 
a people, honest and chaste, because they were workers. 
Their ways might be rough, their slang perhaps strong. 
But no prevalence among them of a prurient fiction 
inflamed their passions ; no fescennine plays blanched 
the bloom of their modesty. Their discipline was 
Spartan, not Athenian ; but it made their life robust 
and sound. The sharp hellebore cleansed their heads 
for a more discerning practical sense. They never had 

to meet what Carlyle declares the present practi- 

67 



Address. 

cal problem of governments : '' given, a world of 
knaves, to educe an honesty from their united ac- 
tion." 

As their numbers increased, and their industry be- 
came various, the sense of independence on foreign 
countries was constantly nurtured. The feeling of in- 
ward likeness and sympathy among themselves, the 
tendencies to combine in an organic union, grew al- 
ways more earnest. Patriotism was intensified into a 
passion ; since, if any people owned their lands, cer- 
tainly they did, who had hewn out their spaces amid 
the woods, had purchased them not with wampum 
but with work, had fertilized them with their own 
blood. And, at last, trained by labor and by war, by edu- 
cational influences, Christian teachings, legislative re- 
sponsibilities, commercial success, — at last, the spirit 
which they had brought, which in Europe had been re- 
sisted and thwarted until its force was largely broken, 
but which here had not died, and had not declined, but 
had continued diffused as a common life among them 
all, — this made their separate establishment in the world 
a necessity of the time. " Monarchy unaccountable is 
the worst sort of tyranny, and least of all to be endured by 
free-born men " — that was a maxim of Aristotle's poli- 
tics, twenty centuries before their Congress. 1 1 had been 
repeated and emphasized by Milton, while the ances- 
tors of those assembled in the Congress were fighting 
for freedom across the seas.'"' Holland had believed it, 

* Milton had added other words, in the same great discourse of Lib- 
68 



The fruit of the American Spirit. 

and protestant Germany, as well as England. It be- 
came the vivid and illuminating conviction of the 
people here gathered ; and in its light the Republic 
dawned. The fore-gleams of that were playing already 
along the horizon, while Burke was speaking. Before 
his words had reached this country, the small red rim 
was palpable on the eastern sky, showing the irresisti- 
ble up-spring of that effulgent yet temperate day 
which never since has ceased to shine. 

All this was the work of that early distinctive Amer- 
ican Spirit, so rich in its history, so manifold in its 
sources, so supreme in its force. It had not been 
born of sudden passion. It was not the creature of 
one school of theology. It had had no narrow insu- 
lar origin. It was richer and broader than Burke 
himself discerned it to be. Holland and France, 
as well as England, had contributed to it. From the 
age of Elizabeth, and of William the Silent, of Henry 
Fourth and Gustavus Adolphus, it had burst forth upon 
these shores. It had here been working for a century 
and a half, before the Stamp Act. It had wrought in 

ert^s which might have served as a motto for the Congress convened at 
Philadelphia, just a hundred years after his death : 

" And surely they that shall boast, as we do, to be a free nation, and 
not to have in themselves the power to remove or to abolish any governor, 
supreme or subordinate, with the government itself upon urgent causes, 
may please their fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to cozen 
babies, but are indeed under tyranny and servitude, as wanting that power 
which is the root and source of all liberty, to dispose and economize in 
the land which God hath given them, as masters of family in their own 
house and free inheritance." 

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. 

69 



Address. 

Europe for three generations, before the first hemlock 
hut sheltered a white face between Plymouth and 
Jamestown. It had been bom of vehement struggle, 
vast endurance, sublime aspiration, heroic achievement : 
and on this reserved continent of the future God gave 
it room, incentive, training. Assault did not destroy it 
here. Reaction did not waste it. It flourished more 
royally, because transplanted. At last it sent back of 
its inherent, perennial life, to revive the lands from 
which at the outset it had come. 

The work of that spirit is what we inherit. It was 
that which got its coveted relief from paying three- 
pence a pound upon tea, by erecting another empire 
in the world. It was that which counseled, wrought, 
and fought, from the first Congress to the last capitula- 
tion. It is that which every succeeding reminiscence, 
in the coming crowded centennial years, will constant- 
ly recall. It is that which interlinks our annals with 
those of the noblest time in Europe, and makes us 
heirs to the greatness of its history. It is that which 
showstheprovidenceof Himwho isthe eternal Master- 
builder of states and peoples, and the reach of whose 
plan runs through the ages ! 

The patriot's duty, the scholar's mission, the phil- 
anthropist's hope, are illustrated by it. For as long as 
this spirit survives among us, uncon'upted by luxury, 
unabated by time, no matter what the strife of parties, 
no matter what the commercial reverse, institutions 

which express it will be permanent here as the moun- 
70 



May it be enduring f 

tains and the stars. When this shall fail, if fail it does, 
it will not need a foreign foe, it will not ask domestic 
strife, to destroy our liberties. Of themselves they will 
fall ; as the costly column, whose base has rotted ; as 
the mighty frame, whose life has gone I 

May He who brought it, still maintain it : — that 
when others are gathered here, a hundred years hence, 
to review the annals not yet written, they may have 
only to trace the unfolding of its complete and 
sovereign life ! 

71 



PROCEEDINGS. 

At a special meeting of the New York Historical 
Society, iield in the Academy of Music, in the City of 
New York, on Thursday evening, April 15th, 1875, to 
celebrate the Seventieth Anniversary of the Founding of 
the Society : 

The proceedings were opened with prayer by the Hev. 
Thomas E. Vermilye, D.D., LL.D., senior minister of 
the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of 
this City. 

The Anniversary Address was then delivered by the 
Rev. Richard S. Storrs, D.D., LL.D. 

Upon the conclusion of the address, Mr. William 
CuLLEN Bryant rose and said : 

"Ladies and Gentlemen: The profound silence with 
which you have listened to the honorable speaker attests 
your interest in the subject, and the ability with which it 
has been delivered. The orator has well expounded to 
you ihe manner in which the spirit, out of which our free 
institution first had its origin, penetrated the hearts of 
the people, how it was carried into full effect in the insti- 
tution under which it is our good fortune to live. While 
his voice is yet ringing in your ears, while his brilliant 
periods yet give torth their music in your memory, I 
will not attempt to say anything upon the subject. I 
will only present a resolution which I am sure you will 
all agree to with perfect unanimity : 

"•Resolved, That the thanks of this Society be presented 
to the Rev. Dr, Storrs for his able, eloquent and instruct- 
ive discourse delivered this evening, and that he be re- 
quested to furnish a copy for publication." 

This resolution was then seconded by Mr. William M. 
Eyarts in the following words : 

" Mr. President : It gives me great pleasure to second 
the resolution which Mr. Bryant has so fitly offered, and 

73 



Proceedmcrs. 



<i>' 



in doing so 1 feel that I express not only the unanimous 
sentiment of the members of our Society, but the general 
judgment of this large and cultivated audience, who with 
rapt attention have now been alternately instructed by 
the learning and charmed by the eloquence of the orator. 
He, indeed, has shown us, in the rapid and compre- 
hensive survey that he has given us of our origin, how 
we came to be the great nation that we conceive our- 
selves this day to be ; that these communities had their 
infancy from a great parentage, and were born at an il- 
lustrious time. Your Society, among its great services, 
has been in none more fortunate than in the contributions 
to the literature and the learning oi the times which, in 
the long and distinguished list of your orators, are in- 
scribed in the memory of the people. But in none have 
you been more fortunate than to-night, and none of yonr 
orators have been more fortunate than he in the appro- 
priateness to the times of which they spoke, and in what 
they produced for our consideration. What fitter pro- 
logue and preparation for the eloquence which is to illus- 
trate the successive events of history in this centennial 
period, than this your Society's orator and his oration ?" 

The resolution was adopted unanimously, and the bene- 
diction having been pronounced by the Rev. William 
Adams, D.D., LL.D., the Society adjourned. 

Extract from the minutes, etc. 

Andrew Warner, 

Recording Secretary. 
74 



RICHARD S. STORRS. 



THE EARLY AMERICAN SPIRIT, 



AND 



THE GENESIS OF IT. 



ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & CO., 

770 Broadway, New York. 












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